Magical: Trine Conjures Up Online Co-op In Engine Switch

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I remember Trine as being awfully pretty but no, apparently it wasn’t pretty enough for developers Frozenbyte (and, having now returned to the game, it seems my memory’s not quite what it was). They’re porting Trine over to the Trine 2 engine, giving the puzzle-platformer a fairytale makeover and its sequel’s online co-op.

While Frozenbyte may disappearing off on their summer hols soon and don’t know quite when it’ll be finished, they’ve released a beta version so we can all argue with Skypepals over who gets to be the Wizard. (Tip: start this argument then sigh “Fine, I’ll be the Thief” because actually she is the best. Thank the pro-wizard lobbying of Idle Thumbs, I guess.)

From what I’ve seen of the first level with my unmagical eye, Trine Enchanted Edition has fancier character models, adds extra background detail, blows in clouds of glowing smoke, makes lighting more colourful, turns up the bloom effect (to levels I’m sure some will find infuriating), tweaks camera angles, adjusts the UI, and reworks level design a tiny bit too. Broadly speaking, it’s more picturebook fairytale-ish.

The beta’s running through Steam in a way a mite more complicated than the usual. You’ll need to enter a code and some things and look, just go to Frozenbyte’s blog post and follow their instructions. They have pictures arrows and circles and everything, techniques far beyond my ken. One 1.2GB update later, there it is. It’s not finished, of course, so Frozenbyte warn you may encounter a bug or two. Right now only the Windows version is Enhanced, but it’ll arrive on Mac and Linux later too.

Old Trine is, and shall forever be, still playable, mind; the launcher asks which version you want.

Frozenbyte gets it, just as a select few other developers do as well. Toxic Games recently saw the light as well, though in their defense they did go to the effort of adding more content into their remaster than just a graphics overhaul (not to downplay anything re: this Trine update, of course) and their initial mindset of charging for what was a separate entity is understandable to a degree (I still don’t care for how the community at large handled the reception of it though and it’s just one of many cases where the customers turn into bullies because “they paid money, they have the right”).

Excellent. Now I can repeatedly fail the Tower of Sarek level over and over again to the added cacophany of the anguished wails and grinding teeth of my unfortuante hypothetical co-op partner. And the lava will look prettier as I fall into it, so there’s that.

Thief is always, unquestionably, the best. I pretty much played the entire game as the Thief, only switching to other characters when I absolutely had to (although, the fun of playing the Thief was finding ways to get past areas that obviously weren’t designed for her using her crazy rope swing ability).